I've see rich businesspersons; I've see rich speculators; but I've never seen a rich forecaster.
Another splendid aphoristic gem from my favorite iconoclast author and mathematician Nassim Nicolas Taleb at his Facebook page*.
The bottom line is ‘skin in the game’.
While all three apply prognosis on the future, businesspersons and speculators implement demonstrated or revealed preferences: they take on risks by betting with their own resources (hence they get rich when their prognosis are validated).
Or said differently, they put on personal stakes to profit from a (probabilistic) tradeoff in a given reward-risk environment.
On the other hand, while vociferous in public, the forecaster, hardly parlay their predictions with their own resources. Instead, they are usually paid shills for interest groups or they serve as mouthpieces to indoctrinate and or to confirm the biases of the gullible public. In other words, the forecaster's concerns have mostly been the filling up of the pockets of their sponsors/employers and have been mostly plagued by the principal agent dilemma (conflict of interest).
Because they have little or no personal stakes, being wrong on their predictions hardly signifies an issue. That's because they will just most likely invoke Keynes' 'smart banker' escape clause of citing ignorance while taking cover with the crowd.
Basically, financial 'skin in the game' means the difference between action (investment and speculation) and (no stakeholdings based) cheap talk which usually have been garbed with technical gibberish (to sound and look sophisticated 'experts').
* I hardly open facebook (or tweeter), but I don’t need to open these to read pages or tweets of my favorite or followed authors.
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